Sieges and Siege-craft

my last art competition was won by Jack Sargent and as his prize he got to pick a topic which I then had to make a video about and this is that video and the topic he picked was seizures and see great choice of topic Jack but may I point out that it's actually quite a large topic so I hope you forgive me if I don't do perfect justice to the entirety of it I won't be talking about every ruse every fortification design every weapon used by every culture in all periods but I hope to make a few general points well two main general points and a number of lesser ones along the way so my first general point is that there is a way of thinking of fortifications think of them as devices that enable small numbers of men to hold out against large numbers of men that is sort of what they're for now if you're defending a position ideally you want those minimum number of people on the inside because if you have more than this necessary they'll be eating food and drinking water and and you'll be getting annoyed and board and into mischief and perhaps one of them will betray you generally having more people than you need on the inside is a first bothering it you don't want it so before sieges it wasn't very uncommon for people to get rid to cast out all the people on the inside that they felt we're not going to contribute very much to the defense of the place whose loyalties were perhaps suspect and yo which frankly just going to just be another mouth to feed but I go and fend for yourself so that was something that happened before siege is quite a bit now if you have a fortified city here another one here another one here and an unfortunate City here then when the brigands come riding through which city are they going to attack now the people in the fortified cities they could sleep easily at night they come they were they weren't they were being calm repose because they knew that a lot of people living in a big 45 city we're just brigand proof the brigands aren't going to take us on and they would be right to because what you do is you say what you've got this defensive position we can hold out against these small groups because it takes a large group to stand even a chance of taking us on so brigands we don't have to worry about them it's only really big armies that we have to worry about and of course in the ancient world really big armies were really bigger than there are many tens of thousands strong in 1415 when Henry the fifth was on holiday in France you know taking ha blur and beating the French a dashing core he had six to nine thousand men yet that's that's how many men you needed in an army to take on the might of France in his day but in the ancient world cities were the things that got besieged not castles and they had all many many thousands of people living in them Rome when Hannibal was being criticized for not taking on Rome Rome had between three quarters of a million and a million people living in it and was very well fortified it was an incredibly tough nut to crack it was a gargantuan task to take on and he didn't take it on he actually didn't have that big an army he didn't have the resources to take on Rome directly like that but he could with his resources take on the smaller cities about the place now in the ancient world if you have tens of thousands of people to do something it's quite a different nature see in the medieval period things were small a medieval castle this may surprise you when the Lord was not in residence might have five or six blokes in it something like that it doesn't take very many men to look after a castle there's not a huge amount in it to steal and it's very well fortified and the guys on the inside of gamma crossbows and and Hal birds and things and you know the brigands wouldn't take on the castle when the Lord was in residence or perhaps trouble was expected there might be 20 or 30 men in a typical castle from medieval England or maybe 15 other people it was a very masculine world as well who didn't want the general population in the city the the wife and daughters of the Lord might be there so there were a few women and you might have a washerwoman or two because washing clothes was something that men didn't do in medieval England but the rest of the servants and the cooks would all be men generally adult men and even the washer women might be brought in get clean the clothes thank you all that's very lovely right Bob I go way back to just just the the lads in the castle so medieval castles were quite small in an amount of personnel within the castles quite small the biggest the cracked of Chevalier for instance which wasn't actually called crack de Chevalier when he was garrison do that's a that name comes about in the 19th century but anyway that had a garrison of 2,000 which by medieval standards was huge but in the ancient world things were different in scaled you didn't besiege castles you besiege typically cities and you had tens of thousands of men and when you've got very large numbers of men like that you can go about the siege in quite a different way for instance you've got the manpower to simply build our rap there's something called an agar which is also sometimes called an embankment but you might just think of it as a ramp a socking great big earth ramp so the city let's say got a 70 foot wall yeah and you can possibly get over 70 foot wall no brigands would take on the 70 foot wall it's just beyond them but if you've got tens of thousands of men you could say right are you ten thousand men over there my orders for you this week is every single man has to deliver twelve baskets of earth on to the agar every day and then the rest of the day you could you know lounge around and drink and talk to your friends and play dice and if every men man in an army of 10,000 strong did that and then hand it over to another 10,000 you'd have that ramp built in a week less than a week in fact and a lot of ancient city sieges were quite over quite quickly if a big enough army turned up then they were able to build these massive siege works so quickly that the inhabitants didn't really stand that much of a chance now what could you do if someone's building an agar towards you well you'll observe them start in a lot of periods it would happen for about 60 yards out 60 yards out is is a effective bow shot so you till up a number of mantlets and screen and so forth to protect yourself and you'd start building your your your agar which would extend in height and length but at the same time towards the wall and as you are watching them do that you think okay we can make the wall taller okay now if you make the ball taller you're increasing the area of the wall but to make the ramp bigger you have to increase the volume of the ramp because the ramp isn't just a tall thin narrow thing it's largely a pile of Earth so that would just collapse so you have to have the sides of the ramp at this sort of angle to support it so it's a big volume of Earth to come to the top of the the ramp so you sort of have an advantage on the inside because you only have to increase a by area whereas the attackers have to increase by volume but they're usually an awful lot more attackers and so they were able to do that and they will also put logs and so forth into the embankment to tie it together and make it a bit more stable although one drawback of that is it meant that you could set fire to an agar and this did happen a number of occasions in the siege of Edessa for instance when the Persians were attacking the Romans foiled done by digging a room into the center of the agar and filling it with pitch and and sulfur and there's a cedar timber treated with cedar oil and so forth a lot of really flammable stuff essentially and then setting fire to it and I often wonder how they managed to get enough air to it so presumably they didn't just tunnel into the room they must have tunneled the must have had a tunnel out somewhere so they could get a through draft otherwise where do the oxygen but it but anyway they were able to set fire to the agar but there was a problem of course because the Persians might notice this but they disguised the source of where all the smoke was coming from by throwing loads and loads of pots of burning coals onto the agar from the walls from the top and they they rate loads of smoke and so the Persians didn't notice until it was too late that their anger was on fire so that's one thing you could do another thing you could do is just physically remove the center of the of the agar by tunneling out from your wall and just digging it away and that's what the platoons did when they were besieged by the Spartans during the Peloponnesian War now if you read an account a one siege are there some I think the siege of Plataea though in Thucydides or Luke II D days as they call them in modern Greece is its absolute crack and that might be the best I just remember the first time I ever read that being so enthused by it I think utilities is my favorite ancient historian anyway so the machines put a hole in their own wall went out through it and dug away the ramp that the Spartans were were creating but the Spartans eventually got wise to that and they filled up the hole and that they were able to get their Agra right the way up to the wall but they're still having to pylon to it to get to the necessary height because the blue teens made their wall much taller and a little bit thicker so then publicans dug down on the inside of their city tunneled underneath the Agra came up again and secretly removed earth from from the middle of the bulk of it and another thing they did was they built a semicircular wall on the inside of their fortification so if ever the Spartans did actually manage to get over the wall using their ramp they would find themselves Oh having conquered a small semicircular space and then they've got another wall to deal with and then how we're going to get tens of thousands of people in here to build a ramp because it's really small and they keep dropping stones on us and they just you know this is just awful so loads of other things happen in the siege of put here maybe to a video on its own anyway definitely worth reading if you can get access to few cities is bound to be available online so that's that's the Agra so the point I'm making I suppose the general point here is that when you've got armies of tens of thousands these sort of things become really quite feasible and quite easy to do in fact and largest loads of sieges were successful because of the threat of this although the amount of labour was also made enormous ly greater in the Hellenistic period when people started producing really powerful catapults and the defenders could use these to stop the engineers making the agar which meant that you didn't have to start sixty yards away from the wall you have to start out getting twenty one hundred and fifty yards away from the wall to together safe location now how would you actually build Yaga well one of the things you would do is have a little shed that you could work in so that you can get shot of vineya for instance a vinny I or Vinny is the plural that's one word for it but there are others there's an Pella and calcia is the Macedonia which I'm told means Sun Hat which i think is rather nice so you this would be a light wooden frame with perhaps two layers of leather and sometimes they put seaweed in between packed in seaweed in between which would this be spongy and absorbent against the impacts of missiles and was also quite good against incendiary devices because the seaweed would stop think catching fire you often see them pictured as by modern artists as being on wheels but as far as we know in fact a lot of them just had the bottoms of other frames trimmed to a spike and there was no way there's no wheel just everyone went one two three grabbed hold of the inside of the frame at lift and walk walk and drop down and then you've exposed the next little bit of the the agar which you can work on you start pouring in baskets and earth down the front face of the ramp and then you can also lay down rails for bringing up more siege engines and they often smooth off the top as well with with with fine rocks and mortar and so forth and you could also oh and that the front one of course would just protect the rope workers right at the front but you'd have several more behind forming a tunnel and every time the front thing went forwards a bit everyone else would hook up jump and the whole tunnel would would go forwards protecting the workers you could also bring forward a siege Tower now this each tower doesn't necessarily have to deliver troops into the town because the ramps going to do that but you'd still want to siege Tower on the ramp one thing is it's really intimidating so they are a guard on the wall and you see this tower coming above you and they can the people at the top of the tower can see over your head into the town can watch what you're doing and that's really intimidating and of course if you try to stop the workers doing stuff by shooting them and so forth then archers on the tower can make life difficult for you so the the the archery support the missile support that a tower afford it was very useful for the workers even if the tower itself wasn't to use wasn't used for the final assault so there you go so ancient world massive difference in scale in what you could achieve as an attacker and what you were defending as a defender and go to the opposite end of the scale for instance a very famous and oft quoted example of a siege in England is Corfe castle which was defended by lady mary banks who house but her husband was away and she decided wait I'm not going to give in to these these these parliamentarian fiends I'm going to defend this castle with my five blokes she had five men to command and successfully they held out after while she managed to get 80 blokes in they were being attacked by five or six hundred Royalists and they held out for the necessary six weeks and even inflicted over a hundred casualties on the enemy despite only losing two of their own men so well done Larry and Lady Mary banks yes so the difference of scale is enormous and the function of a fortification is to allow small number men to defend against a large number of men so if you've got a large number of people on the inside and you perhaps outnumber people on the outside just sally out just see them off just physically go out there and see them off being in a siege in the ancient world is not pleasant you really wouldn't want to endure a siege if you didn't have to right that's enough for now and as always don't feed chocolates to dogs

Channel: Lindybeige

Views: 849,040

Rating: 4.9633765 out of 5

Keywords: siege, sieges, siegecraft, siege-craft, siege craft, city, cities, ancient, medieval, castle, ramp, agger, embankment, vinea, army, armies, soldiers, warfare, war, lay, besiege, defender, attacker, plataea, spartans, corfe castle, thucidides, thucydides

Id: iq1EHbWTbFU

Length: 14min 26sec (866 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 02 2016